The Promise of Genealogy

Genealogy is central to Mormon practice and identity. Coincidentally, genealogy is central to postmodern philosophy in the strain from Nietzsche to Foucault . This coincidence leads us to examine the relationship between these two understandings of genealogy. They are not as unrelated as they might initially appear.
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Righteous Dissent?

Paul’s bitter dispute with Peter and James poses a problem for thinking about LDS notions of authority because it puts into tension church authority and moral and doctrinal issues. When true doctrine and church leadership are in conflict, how are we to make a choice between them? When our sense of what is moral conflicts with our leaders’ sense of what is moral, what are we supposed to do? Paul found himself in exactly this situation, and had to make a choice between his own sense of what was right and the views of his leaders who had been commissioned directly by Christ to take care of the church.
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Who is Correlation?

I’m being serious here, and trying not to be cynical. We hear so much about “Correlation” in the ‘nacle, but I honestly have no idea who these people are, how they’re chosen, and how the group functions. My hunch is that most of us are in the same boat. Perhaps my/our ignorance works well from our perspective because it’s easier to be critical of an organization/committee that is impersonal, and has an ambiguous relationship within the structure of authority of the Church. Perhaps this ignorance also works well from the perspective of the Committee because they can do what they do in a “granite tower” of sorts without having to deal with the larger body of saints.

In all seriousness though, does anyone have any insight into this committee? Who is on it? How does one come to be a part of it? What is the structure of the committee? How do they decide what material is fit and what material is unfit for the Church? 

Perhaps there have been posts on this in the past that would be helpful?

The Bridal Chamber

The Gospel of Philip from the Nag Hammadi corpus contains some important passages about a kind of celestial marriage in the “bridal chamber.” It is not uncommon for Latter-day Saints to appeal to this text as evidence for a kind of parallel to Mormon notions of eternal marriage found in ancient Christianity. I hope to show that such a reading of this text is mistaken, and that appeals to the Gospel of Philip to butress Mormon apologetic aims are an example of the problem that much apologetic work faces, that of decontextualizing ancient material to produce systematic misreadings. Rather than an approval of a particular kind of ritual marriage that unites a mortal husband and wife together for eternity, the bridal chamber is best understood as BYU Prof. Gaye Strathern’s dissertation, “The Valentinian Bridal Chamber,” argues, “within the context of an ascetic lifestyle where the body and its passions were renounced in favor of a higher spiritual lifestyle” (i).
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